In America, will there be more words written about the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who just passed away, than, say, Peaches Geldof or the Ultimate Warrior? One would hope. I recently posted from his 1988 interview with the New York Times. Below is another Q&A he sat for, a 1969 Space Age one with a Colombian newspaper, this time on UFOs, ETs and such. The interview:

Question:

What is your opinion about UFOs?

Gabriel García Márquez:

My opinion about UFOs is of common sense: I believe they are craft from other planets, but whose destination is not Earth.

Question:

Do you believe in the existence of life in other planets?

Gabriel García Márquez:

The arrogance of those who assert that ours is the only inhabited planet is touching. I think that rather we are something like a lost village in the least interesting province of the Universe, and that the luminous discs that are passing in the night of the centuries are looking at us like we look at chickens.

Question:

From where do you believe they come or who is directing them?

Gabriel García Márquez:

The UFOs must be manned by beings whose biological cycle is considerably wider and more fruitful than ours. They are not concerned with us because they finished studying us thousands of years ago, when they conducted their last explorations of the Universe, and they not only know much more about us than ourselves, but they know even our destiny. In reality, the Earth must be for them like an emergency island in the hazards of space navigation.

Question:

Do you think that the public is properly informed about this subject?

Gabriel García Márquez:

I don’t believe there is a conspiracy by the great powers to hide the truth about UFOs from us. That would attribute the owners of the world more intelligence than what they have.

Question:

To what you attribute the persistence of some scientists to deny not only the possibility that extraterrestrial spacecraft could exist, but the [UFO] phenomenon itself?

Gabriel García Márquez:

What happens is that humanity wasn’t able to merit the wisdom of the alchemist, who considered the laboratory like a simple kitchen for clairvoyance, and now we are at the mercy of a reactionary science whose coarse dogmatism cannot admit any evidence that it doesn’t have inside a jar. They are regressive scientists who deny the existence of Martians because they cannot see them, without even asking themselves if the Martians could be the microbes which make war to us inside our bodies.

So long as science is experimental—and not clairvoyant as was alchemy and which in our times only poetry can be—humanity will continue to be part of the kingdom of the barnacles. We will continue to see with an open mouth those luminous discs which were already familiar in the night of the Bible, and we will continue to deny their existence if their crew sit down to have lunch with us, as it occurred so many times in the past, because we are the inhabitants of the most provincial, reactionary and backwards planet in the Universe.•